Somehow November just snuck on past without a post. Sorry about that. I have been working on a new idea that I am excited to write about.
Assessing student attainment of learning outcomes is a common point of pain for institutions and most find themselves on the “non-compliant” side of things at some point as they work through a reaffirmation. In my experience, much of the problem has to do with complicated processes early on, which results in what I call assessment fatigue toward the end. Assessment fatigue can lead to incomplete cycles, conclusions that are not clearly related to the data, and few, if any, meaningful changes seeking improvement in student learning. What is an institution to do?
Streamline, that is what you could do. Simplify and standardize the outcomes, the assessment of attainment, and the data capture so that there is energy left for a meaningful reflection about what the data mean that can lead to a change that has real potential to impact student learning in a positive way. I find that faculty are the first to note that this process is complicated and time-consuming, but I also have observed that, left to their own devices, they will design complicated processes for assessing student attainment of learning outcomes. Quite the contradiction.
The Assessment Academy is a fully online and asynchronous course that presents a streamlined approach to the assessment process that can simplify data collection and still yield valuable insights into student learning. The course is organized into five modules that address the well-written outcome, efficient rubric construction, assessment scaffolding, and many more steps critical to the efficient assessment process. Most of the course focuses on program student learning outcomes, but a bonus module examines the course content through the lens of general education student learning outcomes.
The primary audience for the course is faculty, but department chairs and deans will benefit as well. While a single participant can enroll at any time, the most common approach is for an institution to, at a reduced per-person cost, register a group of people to work through the Academy together. That is what The Citadel decided to do. Let me know if you want to learn more and I will see that you get some information.
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